At the present time, the two of us don’t eat a lot of bread, usually less than a loaf a week, even though I generally make my own bread from wheat I grind in my kitchen shortly before making the bread.

Week old homemade bread with no preservatives generally goes to the chickens, but, last night as I looked at that hunk of bread and the eggs I had just brought in from the coop, something in my head said, “Bread pudding.”

I haven’t made bread pudding in quite a few years, but that thought brought back some fond memories so I dug up my old recipe, gathered the ingredients, and set to work turning that dry, stale bread into something mouth-watering. The smell of it baking was tantalizing.

Sadly, I forgot to take a picture before serving, or even while it was still in the pan, but here’s a picture of the leftovers saved for breakfast this morning and dessert after lunch. I used dried cherries for the fruit in this batch.

Yes, I did say “breakfast.”

Whole wheat bread, milk, eggs, dried fruit, and spices. What’s not to love about that for breakfast?

Sure, it has some sugar, but I’ll bet a lot of prepared cereals on the market have more sugar per serving than a piece of bread pudding.

Ready for the recipe? Such as my recipes go…

You’ll need:

Bread                                Butter                                     Dried fruit

Milk                                   Eggs                                        Cinnamon & sugar mix

Vanilla extract                 Salt                                          Nutmeg

Allspice

Granny’s Old-Fashioned Bread Pudding w/Fruit

For each serving you want to make, cut or break up 1-1 1/2 slices of bread into cubes about 1/2″ square (precision is not necessary, keep it simple!) and put into lightly greased baking dish of appropriate size (toss in any crumbs also). For single servings, custard cups work well and casserole dishes work well for family size batches.

Melt 1 Tblsp of butter for each serving and drizzle over bread cubes.

Sprinkle a bit of dried fruit over the bread cubes. Raisins, apples, blueberries, and cherries all work marvelously, singly or in combination.

Lightly cover the bread and fruit with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. If I’m doing a casserole dish like I did last night with 6 servings, I would use about 3/4 cup total, more or less to taste and number of servings, but it’s hard to add too much.

For each serving, beat together

1 egg          1 cup milk          1/4 tsp vanilla extract          pinch of salt

Pour the egg & milk mixture over the bread and fruit.

Sprinkle some nutmeg and allspice over the top.

Now let it sit while the oven heats to 375 F.

You can stir the mixture a couple of times while the oven is heating if you need to make sure all of the stale bread gets milk/egg mixture on it to soften it.

Bake until the pudding is set in the middle and starts to pull away from the side of the baking dish. For custard cups, this will probably be 20-25 minutes. For a casserole, it might take up to 40-45 minutes, depending on how deep it is and how much yummy pudding mixture is in the dish.

Let it cool for about 8 minutes for custard cups or 20 minutes for a casserole dish.

Serve warm.

If you want to “dress it up” you can top with either some homemade whipped cream or ice cream, but honestly, it doesn’t need anything!